Banned books in Texas, 2012-13

In her bookish column today, the Chronicle’s Maggie Galehouse wrote about Banned Books Week, which began Sunday. The week is an attempt by the American Library Association to attract attention to books about which administrators, teachers, parents and religious groups have complained.

Galehouse writes:

When a book is “banned,” it is taken off library or classroom shelves or removed from class reading lists. When a book is “challenged,” a written complaint is filed with a school or library requesting that it be removed.

Most books land on the banned or challenged list because of sex, profanity, violence, religion, race or politics.

“Sex is still the No. 1 reason, and language is still No. 2,” said Doug Archer, who chairs the association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee.

The association received 464 reports of book bans and challenges nationwide in 2012 – up from 326 in 2011.But Archer said there’s no way to know the precise number of bans and challenges because reporting it isn’t mandatory.

33 Responses

I’m dumbfounded!!! WHY would they ban “The Smile of a Dolphin”?? I’ve read the reviews, excerpts and find NOTHING that would ban this book from libraries! I’m checking some of the other books and while they may be intense, most of them would be excellent reads. What is wrong with these people?? Are trying to take us back to medieval days? Like I said, I am totally and completely dumbfounded by this list of books. Thank God for Amazon.com!

These are books banned in 2012-2013; presumably because they are new or new to the library. Catcher looks pretty tame these days—but that illuminates just how absurd book banning is…
On the other hand, it does look like most of these books were deemed inappropriate for age group and not banned, just moved to higher grade levels.

Sites such as the Chron sell advertising. Since there is no way to measure actual results, they price the advertising on the basis of “clicks”, which is in one way or another the number of times a computer clicks on the site. By using a slideshow they artificially inflate the number of “clicks” and therefore the prices charged for advertising.

I find it funny that a lot of them are banned for nudity. But surely there are no explicit pictures or anything. So, because we are envisioning the character to be nude, then it’s a bad thing? That seems laughable at best…how dare you envision a character to be nude in your mind. *gasp*

The idea that a school library is “banning” a book by referring it to the next school level is silly. So a school can’t decide what’s age appropriate without labeling it as “banning” ?!?!! Listen, “banning” a book is prohibiting a book from all stores and libraries…not just a single school. If you people want to be offended, please find actual mistreatment and let people do their jobs by deciding what is an appropriate use if space in a school library. For every “banned” book you WANT in a school library, think about what books aren’t already there that would far more educational.

I remember that my school painted a diaper on the kid from “Where the Wild Things Are” when he was falling naked in one of the drawings. You could see a little “u” where his privates were drawn. It might have been as graphic as a big U around a little u, but I really don’t remember from nearly 50 years ago. Yes, I saw it “pre-diaper,” and I’m still traumatized by it.

I also remember that as one of the stupidest books ever. I still don’t know why people buy it. I’d ban that one for “no intellectual content and bad artwork.”

As someone who has worked in the ALA I can tell you that most of the requests come from a very, very, very small group of people. Better vetting of complaints needs to be done because why would you want to allow a single person submitting multiple requests multiple times asking for over 20 different books to be banned?